CoverHound’s Insurance Guru

About the company

CoverHound is a B2C/B2B startup that allows users to compare real rates from trusted insurers and get the right coverage for auto, renters, home, cyber, and small business insurance.

Overview

After looking at top of the funnel data, the Small Business Product Owner/PM and I realized that majority of our visitor drop-off occurred during the form portion of the checkout flow. We ran a quick usability test with 7 users of the survey to further investigate. We learned that the main reason this was happening was that our users knew they needed insurance for protection, but they had no idea what type of insurance they needed for their small business. The product and design teams decided to create an educational tool to help all types of small business owners learn about the protection they need before purchasing insurance.

ROLE

I was the lead designer for CoverHound’s Insurance Guru for both mobile and desktop. I worked closely with the UX Manager, the Product Owner, as well as the Marketing Design team to get this shipped.

Product Owner/PM: Amy Wei

Product Designer: Cat

Marketing Designer: Katya Lombrozo

Timeline

By using a user-centered design approach, I was able to rapidly iterate in 3 design cycles before working with marketing.

Constraints

Since the entry point for this questionnaire will be on the marketing website, I wasn't able to produce any visual design work for this project. I worked closely with the marketing designer and the Head of Design to apply the visual design.

Competitive/Comparative Analysis

My team and I started our design process with a competitive and comparative analysis. We evaluated a variety of apps to assess their strengths and weaknesses in the market. We wanted to see how we could better solve the problem of users who don't know what kind of insurance they need when signing up.

Success Metrics

I worked closely with the UX Manager to define metrics for this feature to measure impact and success of the design. We set up the following metrics:

Task completion

The median time to see how long it takes users from starting the questionnaire to getting their recommendations

An increase in completed checkout sessions

Some of the success metrics we defined during our meeting

Job STORIES

Depending on feature request, we circle back to: What are we trying to solve? Who are we building this for?

We looked at our small business owner personas that help us develop user stories:

As a small business owner, I want to answer questions about my business, so that I can get recommended products.

As a small business owner, I want to review each insurance product that is and isn't recommended to me, so that I can understand why I need these products for my business.

As a small business owner, I want to continue with my recommended products to get quotes, so that I can purchase these products for my business.

UI SKETCHING & GATHERING REQUIREMENTS

The UX team invited a couple of PMs and engineers to a design studio to collaborate on ideas. From this session, we were able to generate multiple ideas for layout and focused on requirements needed for each view.

TESTING AND ITERATING

I produced wireframes and prototypes and iterated again based on validation feedback.

Validation insights helped us determine which changes were successful and which changes needed to be re-evaluated in future iterations.

Here are a couple insights that are worth mentioning:

The most eye-opening insight was that the copy was too technical and itconfused test participants in our initial wireframes. We needed to keep in mind that our users aren't familiar with the insurance industry and to keep the language easy to understand. In the 2nd iteration, we adjusted the language and noticed a massive difference in speed of survey completion. Lesson learned, we avoided using insurance-related jargon to communicate effectively.

In the 2nd iteration, we discovered that the recommendations pie chart wasn't discoverable in the mobile view. Most users didn't know there was more information on the visualization due to its size. We decided to remove it from the mobile view but display it on the desktop version.

Wireframes v.1

Wireframes v.2

Wireframes v.3

Final screens with visual design

IMPACT

LESSONS LEARNED

I’ve learned to bring in the Marketing team and other cross-functional teams early on during ideation, so they are aware of the project’s status. This increases transparency and avoids taking time to get other teams caught up during hand-off.